I LEFT MY YOUNG avatar to plot her future in Florida and returned to my children just as they woke up from their short slumber. Roman had entered the spare bedroom to tell Tereza he had already received replies from his contacts in Bremerhaven. The captain of a ship called Markyta was willing to take them to Florida’s western coast for two hundred thousand euros. The freighter was to leave Bremerhaven in a day. Tereza agreed to the price. To her, such an amount, while not negligible, was not enough to make her think twice. Roman would drive to the German border that afternoon to meet the middleman and discuss the details.

They emerged from the bedroom to find Babi in the kitchen, eating cake for breakfast and watching the news. Roman explained to her that he and Tereza were going to America for a few weeks so Tereza could use her influence to clear up the confusion surrounding the misplacement of my remains. The journey was safe, and they were certain they would bring me home.

A harmless lie, though I wasn’t sure whether Babi believed it. As she processed the news, she looked truly small, exhausted, scraping the frosting off her beloved dessert plate, which she had proudly owned for almost a century. “I no longer understand the future,” she said between sips of tea.

Tereza sat quietly with her grandmother until her attention was diverted by the images on the muted television of thousands of bodies tightly packed in the streets of Prague. Given the number of shirtless young men holding cups of beer and sticking their tongues out at the cameras, it appeared at first that this might be some kind of overblown block party. But the digital picket signs above their heads soon made things clear. OUR NATION, NOT YOURS, a slogan declared as it unrolled in glittering letters before exploding into a thousand pixels that formed a new declaration: RECLAIM CZECHIA! NO TO MUSLIM SETTLEMENTS! Tereza unmuted the television. Children sang the nation’s anthem as a group of young Czech men proudly displayed forearms sporting fresh tattoos of a DNA molecule wrapped around a mattock. A TV reporter pushed through the crowds and tried to describe “the mood here on Ancestor Day” as some of the protesters catcalled and threatened her, encouraged by their children’s laughter.

“What the hell is this?” Tereza asked.

Babi spat into her empty cup and let out several curses. Roman hesitated. Tereza was witnessing a live broadcast of Ancestor Day celebrations. Once a year, Czech Reclamationists gathered in the streets for a public show of strength.

The nativist wing of the Czech citizenry couldn’t resist the influence of American Reclamation. If the Americans could reject the idea of a global society, why shouldn’t they? Nationalism was an acceptable response not only to immigrants but also to fires, to hurricanes, to droughts and food shortages. Only the nation-state could restore greatness. Somehow?

The movement began in our country as a loose organization of local militias, thugs with knives egging each other on via underground message boards, until it reached the height of its fever during the Summer of Madness. Though the Reclamationists had achieved success in driving a major portion of the country’s immigrants farther west, the organized slaughter of refugees on our soil didn’t bring the full revolution they had hoped for. They were immediately reviled by most of the country, and the government responded to the events by becoming more benevolent in its immigration policies and by tamping down its rhetoric on the “dangers” of large-scale migration from Asia and Africa. But of the dozens of men physically responsible for the Summer of Madness and the murders in Hluboká and other villages, only six were successfully prosecuted and imprisoned.

As extremists often do, the Reclamationists realized it was time to put away their weapons and advance their cause by donning suits and infiltrating the institutions of government. They entered a coalition with the country’s foremost far-right party, the so-called Freedom and Direct Democracy Party, and the new movement began referring to itself as the Ancestor Party. Its leaders felt nothing but contempt and disgust for the criminals who murdered refugees in the Summer of Madness, they claimed, though they were sure that many among the perpetrators were well-meaning (if misguided) citizens who deserved to be treated with compassion and forgiveness.

The movement hoped to claim enough seats in the elections to become a part of the parliament coalition, to spread its influence and normalize its policies. Years after the Summer of Madness, the country began to forget the Reclamationists’ sins, and the field was ripe for slightly more civil attempts at seizing control. The Ancestors unleashed a new wave of anti-immigration propagandist attacks against the leading party coalition. Meanwhile, the party’s online apostles carefully planted assertions that the Summer of Madness was overblown by the sensationalist media, and as the conspiracy theories grew, some citizens convinced themselves there had been no refugee deaths at all. They believed that the media had plotted with the government to fake the event in order to open the nation’s borders to a Muslim invasion. Pillagers of the white Bohemian countryside, impending hordes coming to steal our language, land, and liberty. The fact that the Summer of Madness led to the lowest immigration numbers in decades, stymieing the revitalization that had been under way and causing troubles for our economy and job market, didn’t seem to factor into their thinking. To further accelerate its rise to legitimacy, the party declared Ancestor Day a nationalist holiday so that all Reclamationists could march in the streets clothed in the nation’s flag, utilize the free media coverage of the events, and normalize the existence of a militant party in the consciousness of a skeptical nation.

America had unleashed this mania, had shown the nativists just how ambitious they could become. On TV, Tereza watched the leader of the Ancestor Party give his speech next to the statue of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, voted the most popular figure in Czech history. Filmed and photographed next to this idolized Czech, the party leader gave a speech filled with calls for unity and peace, only to follow them with a denouncement of the liberals’ dream of the world’s tribes unified in the common cause of human progress. The idea of progress was different for every tribe, the leader asserted, and with the crises facing us, each country was better off facing the challenges individually. Nothing personal. It was simply a sober assessment of human nature. Some of the world’s most significant countries—the United States, Russia, France, Iran—had already accepted this truth and begun their transition to deglobalizing. It was the duty of Czech leaders to take us in the same direction.

Tereza asked Roman to turn the TV off. Somberly, my family sat in the quiet living room. I had left them in the midst of this continuous onslaught, the perma-crisis of our new century, to fend not only for themselves but also for me. And in this moment, for the first time, I was glad to be dead, to not be sitting there with them, absorbing the gleeful hatred displayed on their television screen, pondering whether in a decade or two they would be fighting their neighbors to the death over a bottle of water or a can of peaches or the purity of their bloodline. There were no missions left for me. I didn’t have to wonder whether I would die painfully as a casualty of war or extreme weather events, whether I’d lose my final remnants of hope in the human experiment before I perished. Such monumental concerns were left for the living.

In this depressed silence the clock struck noon, and Babi began to doze off again. Roman covered her with a blanket and asked Tereza to follow him down the road to the house of Mr. Lavička. Once there, my daughter dodged the pecks of aggressive chickens roaming the artisan’s yard. Leaning against the pigsty was the vessel that was to carry me home, a black wooden casket adorned with lines of silver along the edges of the frame.

Mr. Lavička emerged from his house, supporting himself on a trembling cane. His wrist was wrapped in a filthy bloodied rag.

“You okay there, Mr. Lavička?” Roman asked as he shook the man’s non-injured hand.

“This is the last casket I’ll ever make,” Mr. Lavička responded between snorts and coughs. “She took a bite of me. Snagged my hand on the edge.”

“A casket?” Tereza said. “We don’t know if we’ll ever have a body.”

“It’s easy enough to store on a freighter,” Roman said. “If we do find Mother, I’m not going to bring her home in some garbage bag the Americans wrapped her in.”

Roman handed over a bundle of cash as Tereza ran her hand across the casket’s surface. It had been meant for Mr. Lavička’s sister, but she had made a last-minute request for her ashes to be scattered in the river, and thus he had been waiting to refurbish it for someone else.

“This your new girlfriend?” Lavička nodded toward Tereza.

“My third cousin,” Roman said. “From America.”

Mr. Lavička spat on the ground. “You see those Ancestor maniacs today? Well, I’m sure she’s a nice enough person. Coming to the vigil tonight?”

“Oh, sure, sure,” Roman lied.

“I hope I’ll see your Babi there too. Hell of a woman. Only better with age.” Mr. Lavička winked. He shook his cane at Tereza—was this a goodbye or an accusation?—and at a turtle’s pace, he made his way inside.

Back in the day, Babi was rumored to have had an affair with the man. Then again, there had been dozens of these rumors, some long after she got married. The curse of being a woman in a small village—never a moment’s peace. Another reason I had been so eager to escape when I was young.

My children gripped the casket by the handles and carried it down the main road as neighbors observed them curiously from their windows. I was impressed by the work that had gone into my death vessel, as this was Mr. Lavička’s finest creation—he’d made it with love for his family, but I was to benefit. I wished I could tell his children this was enough. If they buried only this beautiful casket, perhaps with a few trinkets of mine, it would do just fine as a ritual of my passing, and they could visit the grave to be with me, speak with me. What did it matter whether my bones also resided in this wooden box?

They rested the casket in the garage. Roman departed to pick up the rental van and meet his contact at the German border. He instructed Tereza to pack and say her goodbyes. This was it. By the evening, they were to embrace the road and make their way to the ship in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Tereza changed her clothes, packed her suitcase, and lay in the dark living room with a faint hope that she might get some sleep, encouraged by Babi’s snoozes. But just as she dozed off, she was jarred awake by Babi standing above her, pouring schnapps into shot glasses. Babi slapped the cheeks of her granddaughter as they took one shot after another, sitting on the couch, exclaiming toasts in their respective languages. The moment didn’t need translation. Babi had never had a granddaughter; Tereza had never met her Danish grandparents. Despite the circumstances, their bond was sealed.

I hoped they could have a long future of such shared moments, far beyond the uncertain, chaotic days they were living through. Within the two of them lived my past and my future. Where I’d come from and where I was headed. Across the distance of the afterlife, this bond remained strong. Even if their meeting was the only good thing to come from my passing, I was happy. Outside the sun began to set again, the last of the short winter days.

Having boozed herself into stutters and heavy eyelids, Babi held Tereza tightly, kissed her cheeks and forehead and hands. She shuffled to her bedroom in her slippers, got into bed, and applied mint cream to her face. I could swear I smelled the scent of the cream despite the barriers that separated us. My memory of the scent of mint provoked in me unrivaled yearning. As if my mother could sense what I was feeling, she was too restless to sleep. Instead, she reached for a framed photo of the two of us posing in front of Hazmburk Castle. She placed the photo on the pillow next to her and turned off the lights. Tereza stood in the doorway, took one last glance at her newfound grandmother, then shut the door.

ROMAN RETURNED AT eight o’clock and insisted that he and his sister had to leave right away. The freighter was to depart at five in the morning, and missing it would mean delaying their journey by a month. Roman opened the door to Babi’s room, hoping she might still be awake for a goodbye, but she had already fallen asleep next to the framed photo. He composed a note promising that Babi would get to bury me in the dirt of my homestead, that they would see each other again soon.

Under cover of darkness, my children loaded Mr. Lavička’s fine casket into the rented black van and began their drive north to Bremerhaven. As they passed the village limits, Tereza opened her window for a better look at the scene unfolding in the exact spot where she’d crashed her car. The monument to the Hluboká five was surrounded by dozens of people holding candles and flashlights. One by one, they laid down flowers and Hluboká postcards with messages written in honor of those murdered in our village. We used to hold the vigil on the anniversary of their deaths, but once the Reclamationists declared Ancestor Day a national holiday, the committee for cultural development in our county voted to move it to the same day to counteract the shame the Ancestors brought to us. We’d hoped that the media attention for the vigils would surpass its thirst for broadcasting the salacious, dramatic images of the theatrical Ancestors. We were wrong. I spotted just a single man with media credentials in the crowd my children passed, looking bored, an idle camera in his hands. Old villagers lighting candles to absolve their guilt for what they’d allowed to happen to their neighbors was no match for the spectacle of many thousands of fanatics waving the Czech flag against the photogenic backdrops of Prague.

Tereza observed her brother as they passed the vigil. Not once did he allow his eyes to gaze upon the mourners. Did she remember all the secrets I’d told her about Roman during our only night together in the careless abandon of intoxication?

In less than an hour, my children reached the German border. The pleasant background noise of ’90s rock changed to a news segment, a summary of the events of Ancestor Day, asserting that twenty-five thousand Czechs had attended the celebrations around the country, a new record for the movement. After he’d passed the border, Roman turned off the radio, stopped the vehicle, and asked his sister to drive. Disturbed by the images of Ancestor Day and the Hluboká vigil, she gladly accepted the distraction. In the passenger seat, Roman exhaled deeply, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes.

But Tereza refused to let him rest. “Do you ever attend the vigil?” she said.

“I’m not much for public displays of sentiment. It’s a wound on our village. People like to poke their finger in it to feel righteous.”

“What did you think of the new neighbors?”

“I thought they’d be better off with their own tribes. Trust your own. You know how I know I’m right? They’re dead.”

Tereza glanced at him. “You’re saying they got themselves murdered by seeking help?”

“I’d rather not talk about this,” Roman said.

“We’ve danced around it long enough. You’re a Reclamationist. Right?”

“What do you want me to say? I used to be in the movement. People do shit.”

“That’s a sad excuse.”

“You’ll get no argument from me.”

I WISHED I’D HAD more time to tell Tereza about her brother’s troubled past, to warn her. As I watched Roman grow up, every day I’d looked for signs that he might carry the rage gene of his father, whom I’d left when Roman was an infant. I anticipated he might mistreat other children on the playground, disrespect his teachers, or even raise his voice or hands to me. But he was a nice boy, a quiet boy, everyone said so, and with relief I dropped my guard. Roman wasn’t yet in his teens when I realized that his silence wasn’t simple introversion or shyness. It was fear. As if he still remembered his father screaming as he grew in my body or calling him a devil’s child in the cradle, Roman grew up terrified, but he concealed his anxieties, his mistrust of the world. He wouldn’t tell me about the bullies who pursued him at school, he refused to explain his bruises, acting casual even as his teachers reported to me that he’d been caught hiding in the bathrooms during recess. With desperation in his voice, my son swore nothing was wrong, and I chose to let him deal with the abuse on his terms. Stupidly I believed that perhaps this was how men discovered their strength, by facing adversity on their own. Soon, in this emotional vacuum, the internet and Roman’s friends would teach him to weaponize his self-repression, convince him that people couldn’t hurt you if you hurt them first.

He was a good student, a graduate of the economics program at Charles University. But despite good grades, Roman had no luck in the job market. During his interviews, a great anxiety would overcome him, and he would mask his panic with aloofness, sometimes anger. After witnessing his bad temperament, employers were not interested in him. Then a Japanese conglomerate purchased a fish cannery near Louny and began to hire temporary workers from the area, no interview required. Every morning, Roman would line up with other men of the county and hope that he looked strong and reliable enough to be selected.

Thus began the labor of his youth and the late after-work hours at the pub, where he blew off steam and drank away the stink of fish. He would return home to the apartment he lived in with Ilona, his high-school sweetheart, covered with random cuts and bruises. Sometimes he was so drunk that Ilona had to remove his soiled pants and throw them in the wash. She tolerated this behavior for less than two months before throwing him out. Roman returned to us at the Hluboká house, and the lack of a partner and financial obligations further enabled his new lifestyle.

As the leader of his work pack, Roman would find any excuse to start fights, to intimidate Romani and Vietnamese workers drinking at the same pubs. He and his crew followed women on the street. In silence and horror, Babi and I observed his scabbed knuckles; the features of his face that vanished behind the bloat of vodka; the visits from policemen.

During one night of drinking and fighting, Roman was noticed by one of the founders of the Czech Reclamation, Lubor Zoufal, a local boy who would give my son a new manifesto for living. The two became great friends, and together they were determined to advance the cause. Not only had my son been involved in the Czech Reclamation movement; he was one of its founding members, marked proudly with the tattoo of a DNA strand enveloping a mattock just below his shoulder blade.

After Roman became Zoufal’s friend, I rarely saw him. He’d come home to sleep off a binge once or twice a week, then ceased to return at all. Babi and I couldn’t deny that we got used to the peace of living without him, but it wasn’t meant to last. On the night that started the Summer of Madness, Roman showed up on our doorstep at one o’clock in the morning in torn clothes, a nasty burn on his chest. He was feverish and drunk. Babi stripped off his clothes and began to apply a wrap of herbs and ointments to the wound as Roman ranted about all the forces of evil that pursued him. The enemies were closing in, he said, but he wasn’t strong enough to fight.

The things men do to feel extraordinary. All the stories of old heroes, warriors, hunters—we retell them with great nostalgia. Regardless of how we feel about conquest and violence today, we present these tales of history’s bloodthirsty killers with affection and glee. They signify greatness. And what of the soft-bellied modern boys living in first-world luxury who have no battles to fight, no cities to conquer, the boys whose perception of the world lies in a hard drive and a Wi-Fi connection? They want to make their own stories. They invent conflict to christen themselves warriors. Bloody hands conceal mediocrity, loud voices mask self-doubt. Roman and his comrades brought their imagined battles to our county. Under Zoufal’s command, they assembled at the pub and marched on the dormitory where the Hluboká refugees slept, a mere five-minute walk from our house.

I know only the bits and pieces I forced my son to tell me over the years, and yet a vivid portrayal of the horrors committed that night replays in my mind as if I were there. They were ten strong: Roman, some of his coworkers from the cannery, and members of our county’s branch of Reclamation. They brought Coca-Cola bottles filled with gasoline. Matches. Knives and baseball bats and a pistol. Roman and his friends approached the entrance as the security guard hired by the county came to face them, blocking the door. He was a massive man, and he seemed entirely unfazed by the mob, inviting them closer as he folded up his shirtsleeves. Then a firebomb flew over his head, landed on the first-story window of the building. The guard looked at the flames spreading behind him, the glass melting and dripping onto the sidewalk. He ran.

As soon as Roman heard the first bloodcurdling scream come from behind the window, he realized he wasn’t the fearless warrior he had imagined himself to be. That was true pain, authentic, it was dying pain, it was the pain of horror, the fear of losing not only the body but also the self, the only thing a person could truly own. The scream was the ultimate test of cruelty. Those who could hear it and withstand it, carry on in their intent, would become true soldiers of the Reclamation. The man next to Roman threw another bottle of fire, and a small drop landed on Roman’s chest, burning through cloth and skin. My son dropped the gasoline bottle in his hand and tossed his knife into a sewer grate. He ran without looking back down the road to our house, back to the family he’d nearly abandoned.

My mother and I were sitting in the living room watching reruns of Kommissar Rex when Roman arrived on our doorstep, drenched in sweat, the hair on his forehead singed, his cheeks black and red. He smelled like a gas tank as he crawled into my lap and wept. I petted his hair and filthy cheeks with an animal’s affection, the love that makes you capable of ripping limb from body, love I hadn’t felt since he was unable to speak or walk. And yet I felt disgust, pity for this vile creature under my hands, because I knew that despite my lifelong effort to bring into the world a good man, he had done something unforgivable.

He’d come home to stay, Roman swore. He was ready to make amends. But only if we didn’t call the cops or ask for any more truths. Only if we’d let him start over, without conditions.

He and I both knew it wasn’t possible. Blank slates are a kitsch sold at the dollar store, whereas every act in a human life is added to a tally carved in stone. What we’ve done cannot be undone. This is true not because of some biblical sense of divine justice, but because of the nature of human memory. We are our own history, we store our past actions within our bodies whether we like it or not.

I pushed Roman for honesty, refusing to let him go unaccountable, hoping the tough love would at last instill in him a sense of responsibility. I followed him around the house as Babi watched us, chewing on her fingernails. He needed to confess only once, I said, to tell us what he’d done, because the truth could never be as bad as what I imagined.

Suddenly he raised his arms and slapped my face, one strike from the left, one from the right. They were weak hits, clumsy, the fumbling of a drunken bar brawler, not a trained fighter. He drew a bit of blood from my nose as I fell back against the wall and prepared to claw his eyes out should he strike again. It was over as quickly as it had begun.

I looked upon him and his reddened hand, he looked upon me and my injured face, and we knew each other, we recognized each other in this moment because we both knew it had been coming for years. Roman fell to his knees; he put his hands around my ankles and begged for forgiveness with spit and snot dripping from his chin. But I knew we had lost each other that night. This moment would define our relationship for the rest of our lives, as Roman would spend his attempting to make up for what he had done to me. But I would never forgive.

We stayed up for hours, waiting for the police to bust down our door and haul Roman away or show his face on the news and declare him one of the nation’s most wanted criminals. But the sirens and police lights remained on the opposite side of the village as the firemen fought the flames all night and the police struggled to find eyewitnesses. Eventually, Babi and I walked to the burning dormitory to see if we could help. We watched until morning, when the firemen were able to carry the singed bodies out onto the pavement.

It took two days for Roman’s fever to retreat, a few more for him to regain his senses and color. From dawn to dusk I asked my son what had happened that night—about the source of burns on his chest, what he knew about the ruin of a dormitory in our village—and Roman pretended there was nothing to talk about. Our village became the epicenter of international attention. The Czech police and Europol and journalists from across the EU flowed in and out of Hluboká as our neighbors roamed the streets like lost children, looking for an explanation, some understanding of what had occurred in our serene countryside. What could I tell them? I knew my son had been there, though he refused to confess. I stayed inside as the weeks passed and the investigations concluded. Roman’s moment of reckoning never arrived, as those Reclamationists who did get arrested refused to rat on their friends. The loyal murderers.

For days I struggled with whether I would provide an alibi for Roman should he need one. No, I kept telling myself, no way in hell would I help him escape punishment. In the end, the police came to our door only once, asking about Roman’s criminal record, investigations of his bar brawls and street assaults. He treated them with cold politeness, answering questions about his predisposition for violence. When the cops turned their attention to me, I swore that Roman had been at home with us on that horrible night, watching reruns of Kommissar Rex. Babi followed my lead and confirmed this story, though with obvious distaste. To this day I am disgusted by how fortunate my family was in that moment. Before the Summer of Madness, the police hadn’t considered the Reclamationists to be a serious threat; they had kept no database of members or open files on the movement’s leaders. Thus Roman’s clear connection to that terrible night remained hidden, and the police never returned to our house.

Within months, Roman had sobered up and we began to build new routines based on avoidance and silence. Roman dedicated himself to a new job driving truck routes around Europe, making money for the family. I mostly tolerated him, occasionally showing some small bit of affection, which my son lapped up. But beyond our fragile peace pact, born of familial obligation, there was little else except mistrust and sometimes downright revulsion. I fantasized about banishing him from our house but found myself unable to follow through. Eventually, the chasm between us was normalized.

SELECTIVELY, MY SON told pieces of this story on the way to Bremerhaven. He said nothing of hitting me; apparently, he couldn’t bear for Tereza to know. I understood. I hadn’t told her either, not only because I didn’t want such a story to ruin our first day together but also because I feared she’d judge me for not abandoning Roman, for taking his abuse. In his telling, Roman offered only the bits that made for an easily digestible redemption tale wherein he returned home and was saved by the maternal healing that Babi and I offered. But from Tereza’s steeled expression, the muscles twitching along her jaw, I could tell she saw no redemption here.

“No wonder the vigil makes you squeamish,” she said quietly. “You’re one of the killers.”

“I’ve never killed anyone,” Roman said.

Tereza laughed with such vehemence that her hand slipped on the wheel, and the car briefly veered out of its lane. “Why would anyone believe you? I see now. This working-class-hero thing you have going. An honest job, taking care of your old grandma. Fuck. You’re good at hiding.”

“I did something I can’t take back. I thought I was a real hell-king, born to be bad, you know, until I realized I was just another dipshit who thought the world owed him more than he’d gotten. Do you know how hard that is? To believe fully that there is some greater destiny for you in a war between good and evil and find out you were wrong? That’s what my life is now. Acceptance.”

“I’m stuck with you for a while,” Tereza said. “But I don’t believe you. I don’t see any humility in you. Seems like you just got better at deflection.”

Roman wiped his nose with his forefinger and switched the radio back on, so loud that the seats vibrated. But something had changed. He turned the volume down and spoke softly. “You’ve known me for a couple days, but I’ve thought about you all my life. Since Mother told me you existed. I always imagined how much happier she would’ve been with you as her child. Should’ve been me, the fuckup, to grow up with strangers.”

“She forgave you,” Tereza said, “which I take into consideration. But I know a few things about denial, Roman. It will all come bursting out of you. The guy who decided to go to the dorm that night is still here. Hiding.”

Roman didn’t answer. As my daughter drove along the flawless autobahn, my son closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. Since the night he’d hurt me, Roman had been pursuing the impossible, trying to make up for what had happened between us. He separated himself from his friends, he stopped pursuing women and abandoned the idea of starting his own family, all to take care of Babi and me, his self-assigned punishment. The same idea had brought him on this journey, an insane attempt to rescue my body from the Americans, his final act of love to erase his guilt. I wasn’t around to tell him otherwise. I wasn’t around to tell him the redemption would never arrive, that even in this afterlife where old slights fade, I still couldn’t forgive the pain caused by the boy to whom I’d given life. Tereza was right—Roman had never really faced what he’d done, and his role-play as a much better man couldn’t last forever.

I needed to turn away from the sorrow he’d caused me, at least for a while. I let my children continue their drive to Bremerhaven on their own, and I retreated once again into my Newts summer, the sweet allure of my and Michael’s achievement enveloping my bodiless form like a healing spring. More and more, this intoxicating dive into memory seemed a much better alternative to the pain of the real world, a pain I participated in willingly. Could I, someday, disappear in the sweet supply of nostalgia forever, sever my bond to my kin and the concerns of mortals for good?